White Men

Millions of white men who voted for Barack Obama are walking away from the Democratic Party, and it appears increasingly likely that they'll take the election in November with them. Their departure could well lead to a GOP landslide on a scale not seen since 1994. For more than three decades before the 2008 election, no Democratic president had won a majority of the electorate. In part, that was because of low support -- never more than 38% -- among white male voters. Things changed with Obama, who not only won a majority of all people voting but also pulled in 41% of white male voters.

HBO is a great place to create a TV show - if you're a white guy. So says a new report by Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan, who argues that the premium cable channel - home of such acclaimed series as "True Detective," "Game of Thrones" and "Boardwalk Empire" - is almost exclusively the province of white male writer-producers. Or, as the story refers to such people, "narrative architects. " "Guess how many women or people of color have been a creator or narrative architect on a one-hour HBO drama or miniseries since 2008 (the year after 'The Sopranos' ended)

A black man was convicted of killing three white men and wounding two others in a racially motivated shooting rampage last year at his home and two fast-food restaurants in suburban Pittsburgh. Jurors deliberated about five hours before finding Ronald Taylor, 41, guilty of several charges, including three counts of first-degree murder and nine counts of aggravated assault.

A side skirmish in the war on Christmas has developed over a Fox News host's suggestion that both Jesus and Santa Claus were (are?) white men, and that people need to get over it. Megyn Kelly - incidentally, the subject of a delightful profile this week by Dan Zak in the Washington Post - had this holiday message for young viewers: "Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure. That's a verifiable fact - as is Santa. I just want the kids watching to know that.

Five white men have been indicted on charges of stabbing a black man and threatening another at a Denny's restaurant in 2001, federal authorities said Wednesday. The indictment follows a three-year investigation into a group of white men described by witnesses as wearing T-shirts referring to the white supremacist group Aryan Nation and having swastika tattoos. They are accused of stabbing the man after exchanging words when he and a friend entered the restaurant with two white women.

The FBI joined the hunt Monday for three white men who allegedly abducted a black man, took him to a remote area, robbed him and then doused him with gasoline and set him ablaze. The president of Tampa's NAACP chapter called the attack a "lynching by fire." Investigators said the attackers used racial epithets, but it was not immediately clear whether they were racially motivated.

Two white men riding in a car with Confederate flags flying from the antenna sped off after a 1963 blast ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls, an eyewitness testified Monday. In testimony that ran counter to other eyewitness statements made to investigators, retired chef Eddie Mauldin said he saw two men suspiciously circling the church in a Rambler station wagon and then racing off after the blast. Thomas Blanton Jr.

Two white Canyon Country men pleaded no contest Tuesday to stalking a black pizza parlor manager, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. David Wayne Haisten, 19, and Kevin Michael Conroy, 21, also pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hate crime. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Meredith Taylor sentenced Haisten to 180 days in county jail and Conroy to the 97 days of jail credit he received.

White men who bargain on the price of a new car get better deals than women or blacks, a study of auto dealerships shows. Ian Ayres, a Northwestern University law professor who wrote the study, suggested that the apparent discrimination may be the result of car salespeople looking for "suckers" to concentrate profits by targeting a relatively few customers who will pay higher markups. Black women were offered the highest prices, averaging $875 per car more than white men, the study found.

As the murder trial of Kevin Cooper moves into its final days, the defense continues to focus on witnesses' testimony that three mysterious men may be responsible for the 1983 Chino Hills massacre. Defense attorney David Negus has called several witnesses, including law enforcement personnel and hospital workers, who have testified that a young survivor of the bloody killings told them on different occasions that three white men, or three Latinos, committed the slayings. Cooper, 26, is black.

Direct from the age of black-and-white television, Reginald Rose's "12 Angry Men" has been redeployed to confront the issue of race relations. This Pasadena Playhouse production, which opened Sunday under the direction of artistic director Sheldon Epps, has evenly cast African American and white actors as the dozen jurors who end up splitting here along racial lines. If the result seems, well, a little too black and white for an era that, while hardly post-racial, has a bit too much gray for such a neatly polarized scheme, the play still has a way of ensnaring an audience's attention.

Arsenio Hall, who was on the cover of Time magazine in 1989 ("TV's hip host grabs the post-Carson generation"), returned to the air Monday night for an indefinite run as the host of a revived "The Arsenio Hall Show. " (It should be said right off that the Tribune Co., of which this paper is a property, is a co-producer of the series.) "Leave it to the first black late-night host to take 19 years off work," said Hall, "and come back here and expect my job to still be waiting for me. " If it was not a stunning return to form -- the original show was a cultural landmark over its five-year run, the place where candidate Bill Clinton famously donned a pair of sunglasses and blew a couple of choruses of "Heartbreak Hotel" -- it was, in any case, a return.

Re "Obama's no-excuses credo," Opinion, May 26 Let's change the race dialogue from a discussion about victims - similar to David A. Lehrer's and Richard J. Riordan's Op-Ed article - to a discussion about perpetrators. Throughout the history of our country, white men have perpetrated continued injury and insult upon blacks, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow laws, now through the so-called war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex. Ignoring these episodes, Lehrer and Riordan fall back on the classic "bootstraps" advice to black people.

WASHINGTON -- An independent review of the Voting Section in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has found a “disappointing lack of professionalism” by many of the career and political employees over the last two administrations, including a polarizing culture that has prompted many staffers to vent their frustrations by sending personal emails and blog postings filled with epithets. The Justice Department's inspector general is sending his findings to top officials in the Department concerning at least three employees still working in the division for possible “discipline or other administration action.” Many others involved in similar conduct, they said, have left the Justice Department.

In the wake of President Obama's reelection, there was much clucking about the demise of the political power of white men and the inability of Mitt Romney -- the quintessential Republican white man -- to capture the support and votes of women and minorities and other Americans increasingly disenchanted with the conservative party's message. Yet, if you looked at the Dec. 29 photo of Obama meeting with senior advisors in the Oval Office, which made the front of the New York Times on Wednesday, you would rest assured that white men are still very much in power -- in the first black president's White House, as it turns out. In the photo, 10 of his 11 advisors standing before him are men, and eight of them are white. The one woman, who is black, in the photo is Valerie Jarrett, which you only know because it says so in the caption of the photo.

People's decision to crown Channing Tatum with this year's “ Sexiest Man Live ” title hasn't been without backlash. Ryan Gosling devotees can't possibly understand why the magazine keeps snubbing him. Matt Stopera has offered a rebuttal in the form of photos on -- where else? -- BuzzFeed, in a post that juxtaposes terrible photos of Tatum next to dreamy pics of Gosling. (And remember the “ Occupy People ” effort last year? Oy.) Over on the Daily Beast, Tricia Romano also takes People to task for its lack of diversity.

August 9, 1992 | J.P WHITE, Minneapolis-based poet and essayist J . P. White's last book of poems was "The Pomegranate Tree Speaks From the Dictator's Garden," published by Holy Cow Press.

IT'S A SIMPLE FACT OF DEMOGRAPHICS AS WELL AS SIMPLE JUSTICE: WHITE men must figure out how to share power with women and people of color. According to the Hudson Institute's 1987 report, "Workforce 2000": "Only 15% of the net new entrants to the labor force over the next 13 years will be native white males." And according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, job discrimination and sexual-harassment complaints just keep rising.

Jury selection was completed Wednesday and opening presentations will be heard today in the rape trial of Mike Tyson. Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion, is charged with four rape-related counts. If found guilty on all four, he could face a prison term of 63 years. He will be judged by 12 people, a jury that includes two black men, a black woman, three white women and six white men. The jury was sequestered late Wednesday and will be sworn in this morning.

There are many ways to illustrate the descent of the California Republican Party into oblivion. A starting point is the demographic breakdown of the members of Congress elected last week in the state. Assuming the leaders in the few remaining close races hold their leads, there will be 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans representing California in Congress come January. Of those 38 Democrats, 18 are women, nine are Latinos, five are Asian Americans, three are African Americans, four are Jews and at least one is gay. Just 12 are white men. Of the 15 Republicans, on the other hand, all are white men - not a woman, let alone a member of a racial minority or a Jew, among them.

WASHINGTON - Come January, women will hold 20 of the 100 seats in the Senate, the largest number in history, and white males will probably no longer be a majority in the House Democratic caucus. Those shifts reflect the growing electoral power of women and minorities, and the Democratic Party's determination to harness that energy to build a diverse coalition. The gains made by women in the Senate were the first achievement noted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada when he discussed the election results at a news conference Wednesday.